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"Joep Frens, Designer/Researcher and Assistant Professor in the 'Designing Quality in Interaction' group at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. Joep's work explores how to design for (growing) systems and the power of 'making' as a physical way of thinking. He takes a 'hands-on' approach to design based in the research-through-design method and regularly gives workshops on cardboard modeling.

Joep is a designer/researcher from the Netherlands. He holds a master degree in Industrial Design Engineering from Delft University of Technology and a doctoral degree from Eindhoven University of Technology on a thesis called: 'Designing for Rich Interaction: Integrating Form, Interaction, and Function' (2006). Currently he is assistant professor in the 'Designing Quality in Interaction' group at the same university. He teaches several courses at bachelor and master level and supervises several PhD students.

In his teaching and research Joep tries to bring together two of his fascinations: the question of how to design for (growing) systems and the power of making as a physical way of thinking. He takes a hands-on approach and is well versed in the research-through-design method. He regularly gives workshops on cardboard modeling and runs a website around the technique.

Before his doctoral research he spent a year at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH), and after he has been invited to teach and lecture in the USA (CMU), Germany (HFGSG, FHD), South-Korea (KAIST), China (Tsinghua University, Jiangnan university), Belgium (UA) and at several universities in the Netherlands.

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"As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the animators presumably haven't. But that's not my problem with the video.

My problem is the opposite, really – this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It's a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible. ...

I'm going to talk about that neglected third factor, human capabilities. What people can do. Because if a tool isn't designed to be used by a person, it can't be a very good tool, right? ...

Do you see what everyone is interacting with? The central component of this Interactive Future? It's there in every photo! That's right! – HANDS. And that's great! I think hands are fantastic! Hands do two things. They are two utterly amazing things, and you rely on them every moment of the day, and most Future Interaction Concepts completely ignore both of them. Hands feel things, and hands manipulate things.

Go ahead and pick up a book. Open it up to some page. Notice how you know where you are in the book by the distribution of weight in each hand, and the thickness of the page stacks between your fingers. Turn a page, and notice how you would know if you grabbed two pages together, by how they would slip apart when you rub them against each other.

Go ahead and pick up a glass of water. Take a sip. Notice how you know how much water is left, by how the weight shifts in response to you tipping it.

Almost every object in the world offers this sort of feedback. It's so taken for granted that we're usually not even aware of it. Take a moment to pick up the objects around you. Use them as you normally would, and sense their tactile response – their texture, pliability, temperature; their distribution of weight; their edges, curves, and ridges; how they respond in your hand as you use them.

There's a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close–up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called 'work' for millions of years.

Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit. What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?

I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."